Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Less than an hour after the Supreme Court struck down a provision of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), CNN invited anti-gay hate group leader Tony Perkins to comment on the decision and allowed him to promote damaging myths about marriage equality.

During the June 26 edition of CNN Newsroom, host Wolf Blitzer invited Perkins - president of the anti-gay hate group Family Research Council (FRC) - to comment on the Supreme Court's decision in Windsor v. United States, which struck down a provision of DOMA that prohibited the federal government from recognizing legal same-sex marriages.

Perkins responded by peddling a number of blatant falsehoods about marriage equality, none of which Blitzer challenged:

PERKINS: What we're going to see happen over time as this plays out in the jurisdictions that have adopted same-sex marriage, you're going to see a loss of parental rights as children are taught in school morals that are contradictory to their parents', religious liberty loss from business owners, bakers, florists and others who are forced to comply with a different view of marriage, as well as even churches - in some places religious organizations losing their tax exemption because they fail to comply with the force of the state in terms of redefining marriage.

Each of Perkins' horror stories about same-sex marriage have been repeatedly debunked. These claims are also not relevant to the Supreme Court's DOMA decision, which merely allows for federal recognition of same-sex marriages in states that have already legalized marriage equality.

CNN also invited Albert Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, to condemn the decision. Unsurprisingly, Mohler called the Supreme Court's decision "very, very devastating for our country over the long term."

CNN has a history of promoting Perkins' commentary on a range of issues, despite his record of making extreme, hateful, and wildly inaccurate claims about LGBT people.